One night when I was working the candy stand, a big kid with sideburns and a ‘fro flung his hand over the glass case to grab some candy bars. Before he could lay a hand on the Snickers he was going for, I flipped the hinged wooden door up and shut it hard. He pulled his hand back, howling, “Bitch, white bitch!”

He wasn’t alone; one of his two friends reached out to slap me. I surprised everybody, including myself, by grabbing the Windex and aiming it straight for the guy’s face. A lobby fight ensued, and Dean called the precinct.

The cops warned us when they arrived, “...you call the precinct once and the word is out on the street; we can only come so many times.” What if there had been a gun?

As it turned out, nobody was killed, allowing me to safely visit my memories of running the St. George Theatre in 1976. The present and the past often converge in my memory. Some of what I write about was once dangerous, but I view it from a safe distance, like watching Knife in the Water through the glass that separated the movie screen from the theater lobby. Occasionally that remembered danger intrudes on the present.

Last night I stopped at a favorite local wine shop. It was dark on the street, and, as is periodically true in St. George, teenagers — a large crowd — were milling around. They happened to be doing this directly in front of the store. Their milling seemed a little threatening; a woman in the shop observed that most seemed to be wearing red — hoodies, ballcaps, etc. — a cluster of gang members? We were waiting for the street to clear, but instead the kids — there were about six — all got into a sedan parked at the curb.

“I’ll lock the shop door,” the proprietor offered. I was relieved, then sickened, ashamed of being relieved. It had been a long time since I’d had that siege feeling. It’s one thing to write about confrontations at the concession stand, quite another to feel the ancient adrenal rush. I glanced at my car, parked just to the right of the store’s entrance and thought about my exit, carrying two heavy bags of wine. I’m well past defending myself, with or without Windex.

At the theater, we would never have locked our doors. First of all, we couldn’t afford to: those kids were our public, then, in a larger sense, they were our community.

My wine was packed and paid for, so I made a break for it, strode to the car, stashed my bags in the backseat and hit the door locks. Deep breath. In my rear-vision mirror I could see the boys in the car behind me. I can’t say “clearly,” because the smoke inside that car was so thick, it was hard to make much out — except that, like teenagers everywhere, like myself when I was their age, these kids were completely self-absorbed. They were likely stoned out of their wits, the way kids who came to our theater thirty-nine years before (grandfathers now?) had been.

I feed on nostalgia. A friend who loves old theaters too thinks it’s part of the bargain we make with ourselves: all that brocade and great arching space is part of my longing to return to something that may never have been, exactly as I imagine it. Nostalgia’s roots — from the Greek, nostos (to return home), and algos (ache) — are honorable, but you have to be careful. Who hasn’t ached at the thought of returning home?

Go back, I tell myself, just don’t get too comfortable. Remember that you have read ahead in the text of your life, and so far it has all more or less worked out. The person you’re visiting back there feels like someone locked, not in a wine shop, but in time. The kid who wanted the Snickers — and his friend, the guy you Windexed — are locked in there too. Perhaps they came back another night, it’s not entirely unlikely. Were they down front the Saturday we packed the place for The Exorcist? I think of them eating a Snickers, one they paid for.

The St. George Theatre is acoustically perfect. An old friend of mine, a former projectionist at Radio City Music Hall and an inveterate theater buff, says, “Most of them are sweet, the old houses.” He means the palaces: like the St. George, a delicious amalgam of gilded plaster, velvet drapery, and curves. Something on the order of an architectural cake, heavily frosted. Almost forty years ago, a shy young woman and first-time theater entrepreneur, I stood for the first time at the apex of the curve that defines center stage at the St. George, and had a conversation with my husband, the head entrepreneur, in the balcony. I can’t remember what I said, but it sounded good. Each time I found myself on that sweet spot, center stage, a little more shyness melted away. How can a space six stories high seem intimate? There were 2672 seats in the auditorium. But full or empty — and most of those seats were empty most of the time--there wasn’t so much as a hint of an echo in the hall.This was a fortunate thing, considering the sound equipment we didn’t own — even a mic. When the Paper Bag Players, a children’s theater troupe, played to an almost-packed house completely unamplified, the acoustics were so good almost nobody noticed. One morning before showtime, I stood in my favorite spot on the stage, gazing dreamily up at the dome. A colleague standing in front of the projection booth, six stories above me and almost a football-field away, asked what I wanted for lunch. “Tunafish on Rye with mayo,” I replied, almost sotto voce — lost in fantasies of one kind or another, I had barely mumbled my request. No problem, the sandwich got ordered. That same year, 1976, Avery Fisher Hall, at Lincoln Center, underwent the first in a series of renovations to solve acoustical problems that had plagued it since its opening in 1962, and, to some degree, still do. In other words, while the New York Philharmonic was making the best of a bad acoustical deal, I ordered my tunafish sandwich, without benefit of a mic.

You’re the top!You’re the Steppes of Russia!You’re the pants on a Roxy usher!— Cole Porter, You’re the Top! 1934

Being an usher at the Roxy, or Radio City Music Hall or Loew’s Kings, or really any of the grand movie houses in their heyday had been glamorous, America’s version of the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. At the Roxy, there really had been a changing of the guard, replete with bugle, as described in The Best Remaining Seats, by Ben M. Hall:

“The buttons on their uniforms all bore the same ‘R’-monogrammed microphone motif as the oval rug they marched upon; their shoes...glistened like limousine fenders, and their faces shone with goodness. When the Changing of the Ushers was over, patrons, who had thronged the Grand Staircase to witness the ceremony, could go to their seats, secure in the knowledge that the Roxy’s ramparts were being watched by the brave and the true.”

The St. George Theater on the north shore of Staten Island may or may not have had a drill, but like every self-respecting movie palace, its ushers had once worn immaculate uniforms, blue with brass buttons, apparently, and a small square hat, very much like the “Philip Morris” boy who advertised tobacco. James Pelliccio (The Staten Island Advance, January 29, 1995), recalled “...they directed you around artfully, only adding to the ambiance....”

“Welcome to the St. George Theater! The George is the joint!”

Dafan, our youngest usher, dressed in the uniform all our ushers wore — blue short-sleeved shirt, black pants, black shoes and a flashlight, with a spare battery in the back left pocket — stood proudly at the door, tearing tickets and putting them in the slot of a the rickety maple box. It was June, 1976, two months after we re-opened the 2672-seat St. George Theatre.

Was Dafan sixteen? He said he was. At any rate, he needed the job. His older cousin, Tony, who looked every bit of his nineteen years, had vouched for Dafan — good enough for us.

“The George is the joint?” queried Dean, standing closer than Dafan realized. He twitched. “Yeah!...um Yes! We all think that, well, we need a slogan, you know, something catchy!”

Unlike the Roxy, the St. George had no ex-Marine sergeant to march the ushers in a column of twos, but there was a spirit within the staff of our theater, nonetheless. We “managers” were so busy trying to cobble a living from the 2672-seat behemoth, that it had never occurred to us to think about some kind of uniform. The ushers “designed” the outfit themselves. They met together, then came to us, pointing out that everybody had to look alike.

“You know,” said Tony, “So we stands out, so people know we’re in charge, we the ones they come to...”

Ushers in the golden era mostly complemented the elegance of the surroundings, guiding older women to their seats, tidying up, but things had changed. Our ushers were more like members of a posse in the old west. To keep order, they all had to dress alike, and they knew it. Problem was, they couldn’t all afford the blue shirt and black pants: all were on limited incomes and some came from the projects. Accordingly, one of our “managers” broke into the cash box at the candy stand and “appropriated” the hundred dollars necessary to make everyone look more or less the same. They bought their own flashlights, and we provided the batteries.

If S.L. “Roxy” Rothafel took pride in his “Dragoons,” we loved our ushers, box office and concession staff, all local kids from a variety of backgrounds, who were as loyal to each other as they were to us.

Dean wondered, that night, hangin’ with Dafan next to the ticket box, what Rothafel would have thought if an usher had referred to his Roxy as “the joint.”

The George is the joint. It had a nice ring to it. Staff pride! It was our only collateral.

Woman in the ticket booth ca. 1930s. From the Kentucky Digital Library.

In late fall nearing the end of our year at the St. George Theatre, Dean was on the phone to our booker, Rick, the guy we paid fifty bucks a week, to negotiate film from the distributors. He was having a hard time finding us any product, because our ticket sales were so low. They began to talk numbers.

“Maybe,” said Rick, “you could plump the numbers up, so UA and Warner an’ all the rest would wanna rent you a movie?”

“Waddaya mean, plump up the numbers?”

“Ya know, report more of the actual ticket sales. They don’ wanna bother with you, ‘cause your numbers are so low.”

“What do you mean?” asked Dean. “These are the actual numbers! What am I s’posed to do? Invent customers? I report everything...”

A brief silence, Nick whistled low.

“You mean you been tellin’ the truth all along — those were real ticket sales you reported? Nobody does that! How would you make a living?”

What Rick was talking about was the time-tested art of palming tickets, which, apparently was the norm in the business back then, rather than the exception.

I had never heard of palming until I ran a movie theater.

To understand this and other seedy practices of movie theater management, you’ll need a refresher course in “legitimate” ticket-selling :

1. The patron enters the lobby and approaches the box office window, child or adult or senior citizen.

2. If the theater owner is on the level, the customer pays and the box office worker pushes a button ejecting a ticket from a metal plate.

3. The customer proceeds to the ticket taker, usually an usher, who tears the ticket and gives the second half back to the patron, who enters the theater.

That’s how we did it at the St. George Theatre, and we were broke in a year. Some time in February of 1977, about two months before we lost our shirts entirely, we learned that the manager of a certain now-defunct Cinema on Forest Avenue and a number — if not most — of our fellow exhibitors at the time, insisted on staffing the ticket-taking station themselves. That’s because they were palming, i.e. under-reporting how many tickets were actually sold.

Ever enter a theater and give the ticket you bought to someone who simply took the ticket and never gave you anything in return? Or, another variation, the person at the door took your ticket and gave you back a half of some other ticket?

In this case:

1. The manager or somebody he is in collusion with stands at the door, does the exchange and gestures for the patron to pass inside. Almost nobody notices — most people don’t even know what they do with the torn half of their ticket, nor do they care if a half ticket they’ve been given is somebody else’s.

2. After this manager or crony has accumulated a number of untorn tickets, he (it was almost always a he) then walks into the box office and gives them back to whoever is behind the bars that night, with instructions to sell the untorn tickets a second time.

Each ticket has a number on it that has to be reported to Warner Brothers, UA or whatever distributor is renting the film to the theater. In our legitimately-run box office, at the end of the day, Brenda or Diane or Yvette reconciled receipts by taking the number of the last ticket in each category and subtracting from it the lower number of the first ticket sold, to determine how many Adults and Children had passed through our doors. Dollars were counted. If the box office was short cash, the missing money came out of the cashier’s pay. At the St. George no palming had taken place; we didn’t have a clue what that meant, or that we were playing the game straight up, while most managers were cheating.

At theaters where palming went on, there was extra money at the end of the night, so the “girl” (it was almost always a very young woman) behind the bars had to be in collusion, unless the manager had gotten around that by asking his wife or sister or assistant manager to run the box office while he raked in the untorn tickets.

Sometimes MGM and Columbia and cronies sent “checkers” on random nights, to click off on a small counting device the heads of people who entered. But they never wasted their counters on us: we were too poor and obviously honest. Ironically, since cheating was considered more or less universal, the distributors charged more of a percentage to everyone, to make up for the practice. So we paid twice: once to rent the film, and once again for our honesty — or was it naivete? In business those two things can seem identical. I am comforted by the notion that, if we had cheated, we couldn’t have hidden it from Brenda or Diane or Yvette, all young women (I would never have called them “girls”) of exceptional character.

We were always running out of things at the St. George Theater: popcorn, light bulbs, batteries for the ushers’ flashlights, rolls of tickets, and, of course, money, but the most important item, the one you couldn’t open without, was carbons.

How many carbon-arc projectors still exist today? I’ve seen at least one demo of this archaic system for projecting film, on You Tube, and I happen to know that, even now, there are theaters out there that pride themselves on this “ancient” technology. If you built a ground fire with a mirror and a lens, and spooled film past it, you’d have a primitive version of what carbon arc does: a spark generated in the brief distance between two sticks of carbon, one positive, the other negative, a spark that lights film one frame at a time.

Poor as we had become by the end of 1976, and expensive as a box of these fourteen-and-a-half-inch carbon rods were ($175.00), we implored our union projectionist to burn even the broken ones, and give us plenty of warning when the box was about to run out.

Well-paid as he was, he went on vacation one week and forgot to tell us we were running short.

One Saturday night in November, the substitute operator called from the booth to report there weren’t enough carbons to last the night. If the carbons ran out, the screen would go dark, and people would demand their money back. We’d sold a couple of hundred tickets and had already deposited our take from the first show in the night drop down the street at the bank.

How many carbons were left? Four? Enough to last for two and a half more hours.

There were no carbons in Staten Island — all the local houses had gone to the newer Xenon bulb technology. Manhattan by ferry was an hour away, but if I hotfooted it down to the next boat, I could just make it to Broadway!

In the porn district, just off Times Square, the older houses still used carbon arc. With this in mind, Dean called theNew Amsterdam, and soon I was on my way, with cash I’d robbed from the concession stand. What was the New Amsterdam showing that night? Naughty, gaudy, bawdy, sporty, Forty-Second Street? As I recall, it was Emmanuelle 2, soft porn.... I remember how shabby, yet elegant their lobby was, and how grateful I was to fork over the cash, grab the precious heavy box of carbon rods, and head back down to the number one train for my trip to South Ferry.​

I still have a box of carbons — found it in the attic closet of our house several months ago. Absently, I wondered what its worth might be on E-Bay — or to a collector. Funny that Xenon was the hot new projection method back then, and now film itself, with sprocket holes and everything, is obsolete.

Author

Victoria Hallerman is a poet and writer, the author of the upcoming memoir, Starts Wednesday: A Day in the Life of a Movie Palace, based on her experience as a movie palace manager of the St. George Theatre, Staten Island, 1976. As she prepares her book manuscript for publication, she shares early aspects of theater management, including the pleasures and pain of entrepreneurship. This blog is for anyone who enjoys old movie theaters, especially for those who love the palaces as they once were. And a salute to those passionate activists who continue to save and revive the old houses, including the St. George Theatre itself. This blog is updated every Wednesday, the day film always arrived to start the movie theater week.